Free Republic

Silicon Valley is being snubbed for Texas by millenials around the world, who are enticed by the Lone Star State's plentiful, lucrative opportunities. Texas' booming gas and oil industry provides young transplants with the chance to find success as oil barons, businessmen, investors, engineers, and landmen. 27-year-old Mark Hiduke, a young Texas oilman, told Bloomberg News that the gas and oil boom has "created a lot of opportunity for young professionals to jump in and be given enormous responsibility. It’s pretty much tech and then energy." Hiduke reportedly raised $100 million to build his company, PetroCore LLC, which is a...

A Hadley man is hoping this will finally be the year lawmakers require the state to post all government jobs in a statewide employment database. "Something's wrong when qualified people aren't applying for jobs paid for by the taxpayers because they don't know about them," said Thomas McGee, a retired adjunct professor at Bay Path College. McGee is the driving force behind House Bill 1762 and its companion Senate Bill 889. McGee first filed the bills, through his senator and representative, in 1995, after he was dismayed to discover that the state did not list all government jobs at state...

iQor, a global provider of business process outsourcing and product support services, today announced its call center located in Buffalo, New York is seeking 125 new call center customer service agents. Currently, the company is accepting applications on line and will hold a Career Fair on June 3rd, 2014 at its call center. The hiring drive for the new jobs is to meet client growth in its Accounts. When Are We Hiring: Now Until the End of June 2014 Who Are We Looking for: 125+ customer service call center agents (Competitive pay and MONTHLY bonus potential coupled with flexible schedules...

Tis the season of minimum wage hike demands and fast food protests again. Frankly I don’t have a problem with wage hikes … if they’re voluntary. I do have a problem with coerced wage hikes, however. And that’s precisely what any rise in the federal minimum wage amounts too. It is feel good legislation that uses the force of government to coerce businesses into paying employees more for jobs the businesses don’t deem worth the cost imposed. It is feel good legislation that religiously and studiously avoids the laws of economics.

My son just completed his Freshman year of college, and is Moving out here to Texas with me and the wife for the summer. Where I live, there's tons of minimum wage jobs and I think he can get on pretty quickly. However, I think he should take advantage of the Texas BOOM Economy, and try to get something in either Construction or The Oil Patch.

Texas continues to outshine the rest of the nation in terms of economic and job growth. Fresh government data from the Texas Workforce Commission (TWC) shows that Texas added more than 64,000 jobs in April--the biggest employment gain in the state during the last four years. The new jobs have helped Texas' unemployment rate to drop to 5.2 percent, according to the TWC. This figure is down from 5.5 percent in March, and from 6.4 percent one year ago. The new jobs come as no surprise; Texas has consistently been ranked one of the most business-friendly states in the nation....

A record 92,594,000 Americans were not in the labor force in April as the labor force participation rate matched a 36-year low of 62.8 percent, according to data released today by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. In March, according to BLS's non-seasonally adjusted data, there were 91,630,000 Americans not in the labor force. In April, that increased by 964,000 people to an all-time record of 92,594,000. The previous record was 92,534,000, set in January of this year. The BLS's seasonally-adjusted number for people not in the labor force--which was 92,018,00 for April--was also an all-time record. This was up 988,000...

Despite the unemployment rate plummeting, more than 92 million Americans remain out of the labor force. The unemployment rate dropped to 6.3 percent in April from 6.7 percent in March, the lowest it has been since September 2008 when it was 6.1 percent. The sharp drop, though, occurred because the number of people working or seeking work fell. The Bureau of Labor Statistics does not count people not looking for a job as unemployed. The bureau noted that the civilian labor force dropped by 806,000 last month, ... The amount (not seasonally adjusted) of Americans not in the labor force...

Mainstream financial pundits are falling over themselves today following a report from the Labor Department indicating that the national unemployment rate has fallen yet again, this time to just 6.3%. The Associated Press, whose report on the new rate is being distributed to news services around the country, says this is “the strongest evidence to date that the economy is picking up.” They cite numerous economic experts, claiming that the U.S. economy is now experiencing vigorous job growth, which they say is confirmation that the economic health of our nation is bouncing back from a rough winter. In fact, they...

California Democratic congresswoman Barbara Lee expressed support for a $26 minimum wage in her state — a move Republican congressman Andy Harris encouraged, assuming jobs would rapidly flee California to his state of Maryland. Lee and Harris appeared Friday on CNN’s “Crossfire,” hosted by former Obama advisor Van Jones and former Republican Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich. The panel discussed the proposed increase in the federal minimum wage from $7.25 to $10.10 per hour. “Let me ask you this question, you’re a good advocate for this,” Gingrich asked Lee. “The mayor of Seattle is proposing that the minimum wage...

Funky job reports are not unusual, and the employment data for April certainly fits the bill. How else to explain the biggest gain in hiring in more than two years – at the same time the labor force shrank by the second largest amount in 32 years. --snip-- What’s also odd about the decline in the labor force is how it happened. The number of so-called re-entrants – unemployed workers who have started looking for jobs again – fell by a whopping 417,000. That’s the biggest drop since the government began keeping records in 1967. Another factor could be the...

Here’s yet another thing your teenager doesn’t want to do this summer: get a job. The number of teens with summer jobs has fallen roughly 30 percentage points since the late ‘70s. In 1978, nearly three in four teenagers (71.8%) ages 16 to 19 held a summer job, but as of last year, only about four in 10 teens did, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for the month of July analyzed by outplacement firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas . It’s been a steady decline, seen even during good times: During the dot-com boom in the late...

In 20 percent of American families in 2013, according to new data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), not one member of the family worked. A family, as defined by the BLS, is a group of two or more people who live together and who are related by birth, adoption or marriage. In 2013, there were 80,445,000 families in the United States and in 16,127,000—or 20 percent--no one had a job. The BLS designates a person as “employed” if “during the survey reference week” they “(a) did any work at all as paid employees; (b) worked in their...

The Department of Energy is looking to regulate two types of household lamps. The Energy Department's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy announced Monday in the Federal Register it is considering new energy conservation standards for general service fluorescent lamps (GSFLs) and incandescent reflector lamps (IRLs). The Energy Department estimates the rules will save the public billions in energy bills over the next three decades and have substantial environmental benefits. But the agency also expects the rules will cost manufacturers more than $90 million, which could lead some to close up shop and cut jobs. It is weighing the...

Employment Minister Jason Kenny has announced an immediate moratorium on the fast-food industry's access to the Temporary Foreign Worker Program. The suspension, announced late Thursday afternoon, came shortly after the CBC told Kenney the CEO of McDonald's Canada had branded recent criticism of its use of temporary foreign workers "bullshit" in a conference call to franchisees. A recording of that call was given to the CBC. In a written statement announcing the suspension, Kenney says "serious concerns" remain following a government investigation of the allegations raised about the program. The CBC's Go Public has produced a series of stories reporting...

".......... Lily, just like better-off men and women, believes that marriage means an unqualified commitment to the other spouse. When you marry someone, you support him in hard times. You stick with him when he disappoints you. You visit him if he ends up in jail. And you encourage him to become an important part of your children’s lives. It’s just that Lily doesn’t believe that Carl is worth that commitment. Nor does she believe that she will meet someone who will meet her standards anytime soon, and the statistics back her up.The economy has changed. A higher percentage of...

For Americans who can’t find jobs, the booming demand for temp workers has been a path out of unemployment, but now many fear it’s a dead-end route. With full-time work hard to find, these workers have built temping into a de facto career, minus vacation, sick days or insurance. The assignments might be temporary — a few months here, a year there — but labor economists warn that companies’ growing hunger for a workforce they can switch on and off could do permanent damage to these workers’ career trajectories and retirement plans. “It seems to be the new norm in...

Income inequality has long been one of the liberals' favorite issues. So there is nothing surprising about its being pushed hard this election year. If nothing else, it is a much-needed distraction from the disasters of ObamaCare and the various IRS, Benghazi and other Obama administration scandals. Like so many other favorite liberal issues, income inequality is seldom discussed in terms of the actual consequences of liberal policies. When you turn from eloquent rhetoric to hard facts, the hardest of those facts is that income inequality has actually increased during five years of Barack Obama's leftist policies. This is not...

CORE INFLATION UNEXPECTEDLY RISES Matthew BoeslerApril 15, 2014, 8:30 AM      Inflation unexpectedly accelerated in March due to increased costs of food and shelter, according to just-released data from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. Both the headline consumer price index and the "core" price index (which excludes food and energy prices) advanced 0.2% in March from the previous month, ahead of consensus estimates for a 0.1% rise in both series, matching February's pace. The year-over-year change in the core index rose to 1.7% from 1.6%, while the year-over-year change in the headline index was boosted...

“Hooray, hooray”! they said in print. 192,000 jobs were created last month according to the Department of Labor’s somewhat flawed mathematics that the media is eager to ignore. Because hidden inside that job gain is another disheartening sign for the workforce: the number of workers who could only find part-time jobs rose by 225,000. Leading the field in job creation, not surprisingly, was education and health services with 34,000 jobs—thank you Obamacare-- the retail trade with about 22,000 jobs—thank you Obamacare-- and temporary workers with 28,500 jobs —thank you Obamacare. So the good news is that if you’re independently...